


Cascade

by marylex



Category: Oz (HBO)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-07 17:18:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/marylex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim's not trying to be a prick, but maybe Sean's got something to prove.</p><p>Set during "Junkyard Dawgs." Written for the Oz Gift of the Magi Challenge, 2009.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cascade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natlet/gifts).



Tim's back in his office, staring sightless at the tux still hanging on the wall, lost in the burr of stiff slick fabric against mindless fingertips as he runs the tie through his hands over and over, his thoughts tangling and ticking around each other, when Sean sticks his head in through the open doorway again. Tim knows he's brooding, but he can't help it, mind half-stuck on what he saw in Leo's office and half-occupied with trying to worry mental fingertips under the off-kilter angle of whatever's in the air of Oz tonight, some anticipatory wrongness, the other shoe hovering at the precipice. He's sure that if he just tries hard enough, he can get his mental grasp around the shape and form of it - whatever it is - and haul it out into the light.

"You're really not coming?" Sean says, and he sounds resigned and just a little surprised.

"What, did you think I was just going to follow you over there on a string?" Tim says, looking up at him, coiling the thin strip of tie over the knuckle of one thumb, around the hollow of another wrist by touch, and he has the most absurd flash of childhood memory: Matthew, the youngest Murphy boy, and a little wooden dog he used to pull around behind him as he trailed his big brother, the wooden legs bobbing as the toy's wheels turned.

He's not sure why Sean sounds surprised, anyway - Tim _said_, he told Sean he wasn't going to this dinner, couldn't waste time at a pointless awards ceremony, no matter what recognition Leo was supposed to be getting. He told Sean there was going to be trouble tonight - trouble in Em City, probably, because there's always some kind of goddam trouble in Em City, no matter how he tries to keep everything balanced and running smooth, like some kind of deranged circus act with too many plates in the air - and there's something setting his teeth on edge now, leaving him off-balance, something in the air, something that ain't love, as Diane would say, if she were still around.

"You know, it probably wouldn't hurt you to follow _my_ lead once in a while," Sean says, pulling Tim's attention again as he leans against the doorjamb, crossing his arms over his chest, and Tim thinks distractedly that Sean should dress up more often, that the tux is a good look on him, cummerbund nipping in his waist and hiding the soft little belly they're both developing - Sean maybe more than Tim, even though Tim's behind a desk more.

He hunches over further in his chair at the thought and studies Sean for a moment, taking in the line of his black jacket, the way it broadens his shoulders - even if he is ruining that line, hands practically shoved up under his armpits like that, and creasing the shirt, too, if he's not careful. Tim remembers a wine-dark burgundy version and velvet lapels and a really fucking wide bowtie, along with Sean's betrayed look as Tim stood open-mouthed on the Murphy front porch, picking him up for their double-date to the junior prom, before they set off to collect Amy Ferguson and Kelley ... God, what had her name even been, the gangly blonde who sat behind Sean in study hall and got him through _Macbeth_ and _Othello_ with a passing grade and probably had three kids and a job at Attica Elementary and a husband walking a beat up at the prison, by now?

Sean had more hair then, Tim remembers - and Tim did, too - but what he really remembers about that night is that it was the first time he'd thought Sean looked like a grownup. He'd already known Sean was kind of a grownup, in some part of his head, had watched him make Sloppy Joes for Matty and Ted and Annie on the nights when Mr. Murphy was on swing shift up at the prison and Mrs. Murphy was working late down at the office of the lumberyard, had watched the way Sean held Matty on a skinny 16-year-old hip and wiped his nose with the cuff of his sleeve, had seen the way he leaned over Annie's homework at the dining room table, guiding her through the first steps of fourth-grade long division. But Tim always felt like all that only emphasized how young Sean was, too young to be taking on whatever responsibility he was shouldering.

No, that night of junior prom, the night of the otherwise outrageous tux and glitter and balloons and too many beers in a hotel room rented on someone else's dad's credit card - that was the night Tim stood on a doorstep and looked at Sean and paradoxically saw the man lying just under his skin, the man he'd become, the man he _would_ become, as Sean gestured at his monkey suit and made a face at Tim like a kid being forced into his Sunday best. He saw a man with broad shoulders and capable hands who would wrap his jacket solicitously around Kelly Whatsername in the chilly spring darkness as they left the prom for the hotel where the afterparty already was gearing up, a man who would meet Tim's eyes as Tim surfaced briefly from a makeout session in the hotel suite, who would hold Tim with a hot gaze over Amy's shoulder as her fingers slid along the zipper of Tim's rented pants, until the door of the bathroom slammed shut, cocooning Tim and Amy in what little porcelain-tiled privacy could be had at an after-prom kegger.

There were later moments, moments when Tim watched Sean on the basketball court, sure hands cradling the ball for a shot, watched him take the grocery bags out of his mother's hands, face firming against her protests, watched him in the boxing ring during afternoon practices and weekend matches, muscles shifting under bare skin in his shoulders and back - but that night was the first time, Tim thinks, before he shakes himself out of it. He realizes he's looking at Sean now like he'd look at a woman, with the same kind of appreciation and interest and speculation, banked hunger tingling in his cheeks and his thighs and the palms of his hands, and he tightens his fingers around the tie still threaded through them, scratchy against the suddenly sensitized skin over his lifeline, his heart line, palms moist with the memory of tongue and teeth and hot flesh against them.

Sean cocks his head and one hip, smile twitching at the corner of his mouth like he knows what Tim's thinking - of _course_ he knows what Tim's thinking - and Tim looks back, raising an eyebrow as he shifts to sprawl in his chair, pushing far enough from the desk to stretch his legs out under it, because two can play at that game.

"C'mon, Tim," Sean says, the familiar drawn-out drawl of their childhood threading through his words, inflected with a darker, more adult edge now. "What's the problem? Why won't you come party with me?"

And Tim knows, he knows there's no way he's going to outwait Sean, he knows that by now. No one would ever believe it, the way Sean gives in to him on a daily basis, on everything from the restaurant where they'll eat dinner to who's drop-kicked from Em City into Unit B on any given day, from keeping Miguel Alvarez out of solitary one more damn time to putting Pete Salerno in charge of night shift on the guard stand - the way Sean gives in enough to make Tim feel guilty sometimes, although never at the frustrating moment Tim's actually pushing for what he wants. Sean'll make him fight for it every time, it seems like - the guy's a goddam rock when he wants to be, like the shelves of Genesee shale thrust through the earth to create the Cascades back home, south of town, past the prison, the bones of the world shoved sharp and clean and solid through its skin under a rush of water near the head of Crow Creek.

They spent more than one Saturday afternoon at that latticed series of falls, lobbing stones in the water at imaginary invaders, and later, they spent more than one Friday night there with bonfires and beer and some weed, when they could get their hands on it, sharing secrets and spinning dreams in any case - dreams of a bigger world, outside the stone walls and rolling farmland and endless stretches of timber that made up Attica. Tim broke his elbow once, falling on those unyielding surfaces, and he - they, all three of them, he and Sean and Jimmy Dudek, who eventually ended up inside the walls of a prison, too, just on the wrong side of the bars, on a third DUI charge - told people it was on the steep downslope to the main falls because it sounded ... well, not cooler, but at least not as lame as the truth. They told Tim's mother the truth because it meant less trouble and a shorter period of grounding: that they'd been screwing around down at the 15-footer just beside the main road, the baby falls, when Tim's newly gangly 14-year-old limbs had betrayed him and sent one foot skidding on slick rock misted by chilly spray.

He wonders what Sean's managed to break down inside of him, finally, just like he wonders what he's worn down in Sean in return, like the constant water running over those rocks to expose the limestone, shaping them into those sharp, clean shelves.

He looks at Sean now, leaning in the doorway, and he knows: Sean doesn't feel strongly enough to not give Tim his way most of the time, but that doesn't mean he can't outwait Tim if he wants to, like bedrock, like the ground under Tim's feet. For all Tim knows or can guess, Sean waited 30 goddam years for what he wanted, so Tim's pretty sure the guy will stand there and wait for another 20, 30 minutes, even if he does miss the ceremony for Leo. Sean still thinks he's got something to prove, some kind of dependability to reassert, some kind of trust to regain. Tim's big enough to admit he's grateful for that kind of solid ground, because he's discovered in recent weeks that he doesn't it like it when it shifts, not any more than he liked the weird occasional earth tremor they'd get from the gridwork of fault lines running through the bedrock of western New York, almost indiscernible, nothing nearly big enough to call an earthquake but still a sense of swaying imbalance, seasickness on land.

And so Tim gives, again, the way no one would ever believe he does, the way he only ever does for Sean - the way he has to be broken down to, with anyone else.

"Come in here," he says. "And shut the door."

He studies the flickering shifting pattern of black slashes where faceless COs - Henson, he thinks, and Aguilar on night shift tonight - move on the other side of the dingy blinds covering his windows, and he pretends he's not avoiding Sean's gaze as the story spills out, his discovery of Ellie and Leo in Leo's office that afternoon.

"What you get for not knockin'," Sean says, when Tim finishes, and Tim finally looks over at him again, where he's seated himself on the couch across the room, hands on his knees, carefully upright like a kid trying not to crease his good pants, but he's got his head tilted to the side like he's studying Tim, and he's smirking.

Of course Sean knows Tim didn't knock, Tim never knocks, and they both know they're both remembering Tim finding out just like that, opening the door of Sean's bedroom in that dinky apartment he'd got for himself after Tim went away to college and Sean got his first job in Buffalo, working swing at a textbook warehouse and day classes at community college, before he went back to Attica, to the prison, the first time. Tim was home for Christmas break and he'd walked right in to find Sean wrapped in both the towel from his morning shower and some _guy_ \- some _boy_, practically, long and lanky - some guy with a hand on Sean's hip, two fingers slipping under the edge of the towel and face tilted down into Sean's palm, and suddenly some things made a lot more sense, things like Sean's gentlemanly hands-off behavior with Kelley and Theresa and the mouse-blonde freshman he'd taken to their first homecoming, things Tim had put down to old-fashioned values and just a little bit of uptightness, and boy, Tim didn't think he'd been _that_ wrong about anything in his life. To this day, he doesn't know how he hadn't noticed something, how he hadn't figured it out earlier, somehow.

Shit, Sean had said, looking over when Tim made a noise in his throat, and his mouth had looked used, almost bruised, lower lip slick and red, and there was a bite mark on his chest, the impression of teeth sharp and clean in his skin, and Tim remembers the way something shoved hard and solid into the center of his own chest at the sight, remembers the off-balance sense of betrayal. I can't believe you never told me, he'd said, that night at the bar - still pissy - I thought we were friends. Sean had plied him with fancy-ass foreign beer and made uneasy jokes about how it was a good thing Tim hadn't come in five minutes earlier, and, well. If that didn't teach Tim to knock before he went barging into a room, he supposes nothing will.

He rubs both thumbs across the tips of his fingers, remembering the clean damp skin of Sean's flanks just out of the shower under his own hands, and he clenches his fists, narrowing his eyes at Sean.

"Really?" he says, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the desk top, tie crumpled in one palm. Its tail trails through a pile of mauled paper clips and scatters a handful onto the floor with tiny tinkling sounds. "I should learn how to knock? That's all you've got for the guy who just caught his ex-wife in his boss's _lap_? She was _in his lap_, Sean. In his _office_."

"Look at it this way," Sean says, philosophically, palms up and shrugging. "At least she was already your _ex_."

"Thanks for the sympathy," Tim says, leaning back again, smoothing the tie through his fingers.

"No problem," Sean says. "To tell you the truth, I'm just surprised O'Connor unmelted enough for whatever it was to happen."

It's always like that, Tim's noticed, she's always O'Connor, or Eleanor, drawn out - Ell-ee-ah-nore, almost - so proper Tim could think it's mocking, although he knows Sean well enough to realize it's Tim being mocked. But it's never just "Ellie," not from Sean, and he wonders if Sean would be so formal if he'd known her as more than the liaison to Devlin's office, more than Tim's ex, if he'd known her for the almost three years she and Tim were married, the two years before that, all the time she'd tucked her hand inside Tim's jacket pocket on their shared morning subway commute, grown basil and oregano and rosemary in boxes on the north-facing kitchen windowsill of their apartment, face smudged where she'd scratched her nose as she poked around in the dirt. He wonders if it would be different if Sean had been there the time she'd faced off Mike Adler in a rage, squaring off against six feet and 250 pounds of asshole the time Adler broke the restraining order his ex-wife had taken against him, pounding on the poor woman's door, two doors down from Tim and Ellie's apartment, drunk at 3 a.m. He wonders if it would change anything if Sean had seen her all those times she'd lie around in bed with Tim on Sunday mornings, reading the arts section of the paper and letting him feed her his special doctored-up scrambled eggs.

Well, maybe not.

"You jealous?" Sean asks, getting up from his perch on the edge of the sofa cushion, moving to peer through the blinds, and Tim thinks he's avoiding eye contact as much as Tim did during his own confession.

Tim shifts in his chair, taking a mental poke at his emotions, trying to figure them out, reduced to an impatient sound that makes Sean grin at his struggle for words. What is he feeling? Not jealousy, exactly, but ... what the hell, anyway? Ellie left him because of Em City, and now she's going to have an affair with Leo, so, what? A unit director wasn't big enough for her, she's got to have the guy running the whole shebang?

It's not an _affair_, says a voice in the back of his head, she's not your _wife_ anymore - even though, for fuck's sake, Leo could have shown some respect, still. And anyway, Tim remembers Leo's words back in the day about Tim's marriage: It sounds like you didn't have a marriage, Leo had said, it sounds like you had a nightmare - so why is he running around with Ellie now, if she sounded like such a nightmare?

"What do you think they talk about?" he says suddenly, out loud, before he can stop himself, and Sean makes his own impatient sound, kind of a snort, and turns away from the blinds he's just pulled closed.

"Not you," he says.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Tim says, because it's not like he can just come out and admit that's exactly what he wants to know. He's got to save some kind of face.

Sean just gives him that disbelieving look, the "why are you bothering to feed me this bullshit" look, the same one he's been pulling on Tim since they were 11 years old.

"OK, fine," Tim says, under the weight of that look. "What _do_ you think they say about me?"

"The same thing I say about you," Sean says. "That you're a pain in the ass."

"Thanks a lot." Tim knows he sounds aggrieved at what should be a joke, at what should lighten the mood, at something that should earn some ribald response about Sean's ass, but he can't help it. He's off-balance and out of sorts and he's just looking for some goddam sympathy, here, and is that so hard?

"Maybe it's not all about you, Tim," Sean says, moving to perch himself against the desktop beside him, and if Tim really wanted to be a prick, he could laugh at that, because that's rich, coming from Sean.

Sean never admitted it, at least not to Tim, at least not until last week, four beers in and two nights after they fucked for the first time, but there was a reason Danny wouldn't move here when Sean took the job at Oz - when Sean came to work for Tim - and it wasn't because Danny had a problem being with a guy running a prison unit, not after eight years with Sean in Attica and three before that down in Southport.

Tim's not trying to be a prick, though - at least, he's not trying very hard.

"What?" he says, instead. "You think they're happy together? You think this is a good idea?"

"You think too much," Sean tells him, shaking his head. "Maybe we could all use a little romance around here."

"There's something in the air?"

"Maybe," Sean says, and he's leaning in now, one hand on the arm of Tim's chair, and he smells like prison soap from the locker room and musky cologne with a hint of starch and whiskey from the drink he must have had down in the decorated gym with its balloons and glitter before he came back up here to roust Tim out of his office.

"Well, it sure ain't love," Tim says, and OK. Maybe he's trying a little bit to be a prick.

Sean's eyes narrow the slightest bit but he doesn't say anything, leaning back to sit on Tim's desk again, face impassive as he watches Tim shove back his chair and get up, restless, to wander over to the window, peek out of the blinds, down into the heart of Em City, empty and echoing, inmates locked in their pods, lockdown but not lights out, yet.

Tim's not sure why Sean puts up with him, sometimes - he's self-aware enough to admit that. He remembers that impassive look on Sean's face, 12 years old and sitting at the end of a church pew, both of them in black and something still too terrifying about funerals, two years after the riot - even funerals for old ladies, for grandmas who'd lived into their 70s. He remembers the way Annie had leaned into Sean's side, half-asleep and cranky from the mourning that permeated the air of the Murphy house, and Tim still had been young enough to take Sean's hand on the other side. He remembers the way Sean's face had crumpled, just a flicker of emotion, before firming back into stoicism, never turning to meet Tim's gaze even as he tightened clammy fingers hard around Tim's own, and Tim's still thankful, in some small way, the old lady had gone ahead and gone then, in the summer of '73, not four or three or even two years later, when Tim would have been too much of a teenaged boy, too self-conscious, too far past whatever instinctive empathy of childhood drove him to take another boy's hand in public.

"It's something Diane used to say," he says, now - Diane, who he had a ring for, back in the day, back before she went on vacation and married a goddam bobby and never came back, and what the fuck is his life, anyway?

"In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not Whittlesey," Sean says, and he sounds wry.

"No," Tim says, looking back at him, and he can't help the little smile that pulls at the corner of his mouth. "You're not."

Sean's not Diane, although there's some ways he reminds Tim of her - or maybe she reminded Tim of Sean: the same quiet capability, the levelheadedness and the loyalty, the way both of them would drop off to sleep like shutting out a light - the sleep of the just, maybe, or just of exhaustion. Tim could look over in the darkness and monitor the soft rise and fall of their breath, blocking out the busy thoughts in his head and lulling himself to sleep as he matched his own breaths, long and slow, to theirs.

He wonders idly if Sean would ever wear a ring for anyone, although maybe it's a stupid thought, for any number of reasons - professional, social, emotional. But Sean always seemed like a ring kind of guy, something of a traditionalist, and Tim was a little surprised he never wore one with Danny, before he came to Em City, the marriage killer. Maybe it would've opened him up to too many questions. With the exception of Tim's friendship, Sean's always kept his personal and professional lives strictly separate - no good to have people like Howell and LoPresti knowing you're in a relationship with another man, Tim supposes, and he remembers Claire casting aspersions on his own sexuality in this very office.

And oh, hey. Look at that, Tim thinks suddenly. She was kind of right - he'd certainly rather fuck Sean than her, any day of the week.

He laughs suddenly, and Sean raises an eyebrow before getting up and heading for the door, and Tim wonders if he's being abandoned to his fate for the night, wonders if - and how - he's fucked up this time. Ellie complained plenty of times about his apparent lack of tact, his habit of blurting out whatever was in his head at inopportune times, and on his better days, he manages to realize when he's just committed some sort of social ineptitude. On his best days, he even manages to care, some. But he can't figure out what was wrong with the last thing he said, this time, and all he does is watch until Sean turns the lock on the door, shutting the two of them in the office.

Ah, Tim thinks then.

The thing about Sean is, Tim's not actually sure, a lot of the time, what the hell is going on inside his head. Yeah, Sean's dependable - Tim's always pretty sure he knows what Sean's going to do, which way Sean's going to fall. It's one of the reasons he trusts Sean with his life, when he comes down to it, one of the reasons it sends him reeling when something slides off-kilter, when that ground shifts under his feet. But he knows what Sean's going to do simply because he knows Sean.

What Tim usually can't figure out is _why_ Sean does whatever it is that he does.

He likes to think he's got a pretty good grasp of psychology, generally, but a lot of the time, he doesn't have the least idea how Sean makes the decisions he does, how Sean gets to the places where Tim instinctively understands they'll meet. He supposes the why isn't all that important, really, in most cases. What's important is how often they get to the same place together.

"Get undressed," Sean says, interrupting his thoughts, and it's Tim's turn to raise an eyebrow, because OK, then. Right. This is where he realized Sean was going, even if he couldn't figure out how Sean was getting there, but seriously? In Tim's office?

Like you've never fucked in this prison? says the voice in the back of his head, but that was different, and Sean's not Diane, even though there's some ways he reminds Tim of her.

He keeps his face bland, because that's always been a failing of his, a stupid power play he knows he's pulling even as he does it, guilt mixing with the perverse pleasure in denying someone the reaction Tim's pretty sure they're looking for, but he never can seem to stop himself. It used to drive Ellie fucking nuts.

"Taking charge?" he asks Sean, who snorts again.

"Somebody's gotta get you into that monkey suit," Sean says, and well. That's actually _not_ what Tim was expecting.

So, not making it to the same place, this time, then. He's ... disappointed, actually, and he tries to tell himself to be reasonable. He was having a conniption over Ellie sitting in Leo's lap earlier, he can hardly expect Sean to act out some X-rated scenario lifted from a prison porno flick, right here in Tim's office.

Although "get undressed?" What kind of cocktease is Sean playing at?   
Tim studies Sean leaning back against the door, and he can tell Sean's not going to take "no" for an answer again, that he's pretty sure this is all bullshit about Ellie and about Leo - you either really love your job or you really hate your boss, his voice repeats, in Tim's head - and Tim can tell Sean thinks talking about it has exorcized it or at least mitigated it. But there's still something wrong, something sliding just under Tim's awareness, like the slice of broken glass or a sharpened razor shank through his nerves, something in the air ... he just doesn't know what, still can't get his hands around the shape and form of it.

"You gonna help me?" he asks Sean, though, pretty curious to see how far Sean will take this, catkill curious, maybe.

"Yeah," Sean says and takes a step toward him, face determined, hot gaze flickering down Tim's body and back up to meet his eyes. "I'm gonna help you."

Tim abruptly shifts mental gears again because OK, then. Maybe his first evaluation wasn't so wrong after all. Sean's close now, really close, still smelling of starch and warm cologne and the faintest hint of sharp whiskey, close enough Tim can feel heat coming off him in the chilly air of the office. He remembers the first time he noticed Sean, really noticed him, not the first day of school that year, starting sixth grade and junior high, but two weeks later when some seventh-grader tried to take a Hershey's bar and a bus seat from a couple of elementary school kids on the Westside bus that all the schools used, when Sean got himself punched in the face standing up for the pair and then kicked off the bus for his chivalrous trouble. That's not _fair_, Tim remembers telling the bus driver, and he remembers the bored impatience in the driver's voice when she told him to sit down and be quiet or he'd be kicked off next. He remembers the butterflies in his stomach and the heat in his cheeks and the righteous anger flaring in his chest when he'd gotten off at the next stop, anyway - not his stop, still 20 minutes from his own stop - and waited for this kid to trudge up to him on the sidewalk, backpack hanging low on his shoulders, head down and eye already coloring up, kicking a rock along. They'd been 11 years old, and you wouldn't know it to look at him now, but Sean had been the unlikeliest of White Knights, smaller than Tim, then, short and wiry but _fast_ when he'd been jerked out of the quiet watchfulness he'd already developed, even as a kid.

Tim reaches out now and traces a fingertip along the arch of Sean's brow, under his left eye where the bruise spread that day, and Sean's face tilts toward his hand. He's still shorter than Tim, but he's broader, more solid now, and Tim remembers the shock of Sean rolling them over in bed, manhandling him, blanketing him, and the way his own hips pushed up mindlessly, his dick rubbing in the hollow of Sean's hip, the head skidding sticky against Sean's skin, pulling a helpless moan out of him. Sean had joked about it, but Tim thought about Howell, who was a tough bitch, solid, with a lot of muscle under the soft layer padding her hips and tits, about Gloria, who spent her days wrestling around sometimes deadweight bodies. Even Ellie was a healthy girl, rounded and curved and solid. Tim generally has a type, he thinks, and it's usually the pinup girls, the playboy models, the ones with some heft and strength and substance to them, no matter what jokes Sean's made about his indiscriminate pussyhound tendencies. Sean's joked about him fucking every woman in this place - except Sister Pete, of course - and made pointed remarks about how Tim's treated Oz as his private harem, but there's a reason Tim's gone for the women here. It's not like you're going to stumble across many shrinking violets in prison.

"So, is this the part where we get to the strip search?" he says, watching Sean shrug out of his tux jacket.

"Yeah," Sean says and tosses the jacket back on the sofa, careless now of creases. "But I'll make it worth your while."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Oh, yeah. I think I can help little Timmy with his clip-on."

He takes one more step into Tim and slides both hands up under layers of sweater and T-shirt, up Tim's sides, over his ribs, fingers chilly against Tim's skin, and Tim yelps and stumbles back - because that's _cold_, dammit - bumping into the edge of his desk and sitting down hard.

"Shut up," he says as Sean barks out a laugh.

"You're getting a little flustered, there, Tim."

Sean's breath stirs hot against Tim's face as he leans further in, the faintest hint of whiskey lingering, just enough to take the edge off, to make careful, considered Sean a little bit reckless, maybe, and two can play at that game, Tim thinks, again. He shifts against the desk, sprawling wider, settling himself, legs spread to brace himself, head tilted to study Sean, and lets a smirk play at the corner of his mouth.

"I'm just getting warmed up," he says. "Like your fucking hands."

Sean laughs again, a sudden spontaneous sound that's broken off as Tim tugs at his tie and it comes loose - a real tie, in a real bow, no shortcut clip-on - and Tim uses it to reel him in.

Slouched on the desk now, Tim has to tilt his head up to kiss Sean. It's slick and sharp and hard, frustrated and demanding and greedy, Sean's mouth opening immediately over Tim's, nothing tentative in this kiss. They're past that, past the bumping of noses and clash of teeth that marked the first awkward time Tim darted in, halfway drunk and fully determined, screwing up his courage the night after their confrontation over Sean's boneheaded move with Morales. They're past the hesitant touches and furtive press of lips against a shoulder, the nape of a neck, the intervening week when either and both of them felt their cautious way toward this, afraid they'd be denied. They're even past the careful way Sean pulled Tim over him in bed, sliding slow and tentative inside him after slicking the way with tongue and fingers and spit and lube, hands cradling Tim's hips as he pushed up into him, Tim's fingers fisted in the sheets at Sean's shoulders as he leaned forward to bury hot breath and surprised moans in the curve of Sean's neck.

No, Tim thinks, fractured, as he feels Sean's teeth scrape across his lower lip, this is nothing like that, and he remembers Sean's mouth, red and used, almost bruised, remembers his first glimpse of a man - practically a boy, lean and rangy - tilting his face into Sean's palm as they shared a hot kiss, and something slides through his chest, clean and sharp. He remembers the sense of betrayal, the taste of beer and accusatory words on his tongue, remembers flailing, more off-balance than he'd ever felt in his life, more off-balance than anyone else could ever make him feel, because if he can't depend on Sean, who can he depend on? He felt it again when Sean took over Em City, stole his unit when Tim was forced on leave. He was smart enough then to realize, eventually, that was his own crazy paranoia, smart enough finally to see Sean was only holding Em City in trust for him, the way he'd held Tim's dreams so carefully those late nights at a bonfire out at the Cascades. Maybe a small part of Tim knew, even then, that it was OK to fall apart, that Sean would be there. He hadn't dared do it before Sean came to Oz, before Sean was back at his shoulder to hold his dreams intact.

Maybe that's why the whole thing with Morales hurt so much, hearing those damning words from Leo, finding out Sean had taken a goddam hammer to those dreams, to Tim's illusions. He remembers the taste of betrayal and bitter words on his tongue again as he struggled to understand, remembers the sick feeling of the world shifting under his feet, and he tightens his fingers in the collar of Sean's shirt, holding on.

He remembers Ellie talking about how he took her for granted, telling him he'd be sorry when she was gone.

They're trading small biting kisses now, Sean pressed between Tim's thighs, one hand fisted and crumpling some kind of paper on the desk at Tim's hip, and Tim shifts awkwardly, trying to ignore something - he thinks maybe it's the three-inch-thick file of Alvarez's disciplinary record - digging into one side of his ass. He's been stroking one thumb absently in the warm hollow of Sean's throat, and he runs a hand down from the open neck of Sean's shirt, down the front of the stiff starched fabric, to tuck a couple of fingers into the top of the cummerbund, pulling Sean closer as Tim mouths over his jaw - smooth skin, Sean must have shaved in the locker room - down to that dip of flesh between Sean's collarbones that his fingers just abandoned.

"Wait," Sean says - gasps, really, words spilling over Tim's lips - and his fingers clench under Tim's sweater, fisting in the cotton of his T-shirt now. He presses his free hand over Tim's roving fingers, flattening Tim's hand against his stomach.

That was a six-pack, once, Tim remembers, muscles flexing and moving smooth under damp, hot skin in the boxing ring, at weekend practices, and he can feel Sean take a deep breath under their hands now, and for fuck's sake, some small still-rational part of Tim's brain says, Sean better not be stopping. He makes a greedy, impatient sound against Sean's throat.

"Wait, Tim, wait," Sean says, low, still a little ragged, turning his head so his lips brush the curve of Tim's ear, tickling and sending a shiver through Tim. "Hey, hey. Hold off on the sexual harassment for a minute, OK?"

There's amusement in Sean's voice, and Tim thinks he's joking, but something twists abrupt and painful in his stomach, a chill wave of uncertainty sheeting through him, and he shoves himself up to sit back on the top of his desk, disentangling hands and lips and pushing away from Sean.

He's spent a couple of weeks now, watching Sean, watching Sean watching him, and thinking, turning things over in his head - overthinking, the way Sean always accuses him of doing, he knows it, but he can't stop. He's pretty sure what Sean wants, it's just that Sean spent 30 fucking years not making a move, and if Tim hadn't, finally, then they'd have just kept dancing around each other, because Sean can wait forever. So they went to dinner and they were there before Tim realized he'd made Sean take him where Tim took all his first dates, and then he touched Sean, the back of his hand, the nape of his neck, his shoulder, his waist. He kept touching Sean and he held on, trying to regain his balance, to find sure footing against the earth that had shifted under him again, against the betrayal shoved sharp and clean and hard through his chest, until finally, outside the bar where they'd had a beer or four afterward, Sean had set him away and asked him what the hell he was doing - or tried to before Tim hit him hard, shutting him up with his mouth.

Tim knows what he did with Howell wasn't sexual harassment, and nothing happened with Kenny Wangler at all, but Sean ... he's got something to prove these days, some trust he feels he has to regain, and Tim came on to him that first night.

"What?" Sean says now, looking up at him, reaching a hand to Tim's face, and Tim ducks away from the touch, warding Sean off with a gesture. "What's going on, Tim?"

"We don't have to do this, you know," Tim says, and Sean rolls his eyes in response.

"Listen ..." he says, resting an arm around Tim's shoulder, cupping his hand around the back of Tim's neck as he ducks his head in an attempt to meet Tim's eyes, and he looks worried, vaguely unhappy. "If you don't wanna do this ..."

"I don't want to push you into something you don't want," Tim says, studying the buttons that run down the front of Sean's shirt, smoothing fingertips along the stiff starched edge of the front placket, and he feels Sean's fingers tighten hard around his other hand, still pressed to the softness of Sean's stomach, before Sean untangles himself and steps back.

"Give me your hands," Sean says, and Tim blinks at him, because what?

"What?"

"Give me your hands."

Sean holds out his own hands, palms up, waiting patiently, and Tim knows by now, he knows there's no way he's going to outwait Sean, and so he does it, holds out his hands, palms down, hovering above Sean's, not touching but close enough he can feel the presence of Sean's fingers, some kind of invisible charge still in motion between them. Sean raises his own hands so their palms meet, and his fingers curl around Tim's wrists, tighten for a brief moment, but he doesn't look up, doesn't meet Tim's eyes now as he turns Tim's hands over and smoothes his thumbs down into the wells of Tim's palms, fingertip pads rough against the sensitized skin, against the memory of tongue and teeth and hot flesh. His fingers are rough but not calloused, not much - they're not the hands of a mill worker or a lumberyard wrangler or even someone like Tim's dad, who had his hands in the dishwater as well as the till at the diner. They're just the hands of a guy, a guy who plays basketball, who pushes a pencil when he's not herding other guys through a maze of bars and cells, a guy who doesn't really worry much about lotions and creams and manicures - just a guy, a man - but they're capable hands, strong enough to hold the world, Tim's world, on its foundation, apparently, and Tim pushes away the memory of a tremor, earthshock, the sensation of the ground shivering and seasickness on land.

He watches Sean looking down at their hands, watches him studying his own thumb as it smoothes over the life line on Tim's left palm before Sean lets go and digs around in one of his pants pockets.

"Don't," Sean says, finally looking up when Tim tries to pull back his hands, and there's something commanding in the tone, hot gaze holding Tim, and then Sean pulls out a plastic strip, something that looks like a garbage-bag tie. It's only when Sean runs it through his fingers that Tim realizes it's one of those double-cuff zip strips, the kind SORT uses when they've got a lot of guys to keep under control at once, when handcuffs are way too much trouble and there's not enough of them for the job that needs to be done.

Tim blinks kind of stupidly, kind of stunned, as Sean loops the plastic around his wrists, and he realizes, distantly, that his breath is pulling shallow in his chest. A curious kind of excitement spirals in his belly as Sean tightens the strip - not too tight, not tight enough that it digs in or pinches - and it's definitely the catkill kind of curiosity. He wonders what the hell Sean's doing carrying this around in his tux pocket, whether Sean's sensed something ugly in the air, too, something he should be prepared for, or whether he's just that much of a Boy Scout, or whether he planned this, because Tim knows what's coming, knows they're really getting ready to do this, knows what they're getting ready to do. He's not some dumb teenager any longer, and besides, they've done this before, now. Well, not _this_, precisely, not on the desk or on the couch or up against the far wall, behind locked doors and closed blinds with Em City's residents locked up tight and snug in their pods like children put to bed before mom and dad can fuck in the living room, but Tim's no virgin to this, not in any way, not even with Sean, not anymore, and he knows what's getting ready to happen.

He doesn't know how Sean got here, but he knows they've reached the same place again, and he knows this feeling, too, recognizes this rawness in the air between them, an anticipatory charge he can scent like sweat and come and the smell of soap on Sean's skin, the other shoe hovering at the edge of the precipice. He sensed it under Sean's touch between rumpled sheets last night, sensed it even in the kisses Sean finally broke off after he walked Tim to the door like a goddam gentleman after their dinner date, that night after Sean's confession, the last in a thousand dinners as friends, the first in a string of dinners as .. whatever they've become, whatever they're becoming, Tim's not sure of _that_ because he's not sure, yet, where the boundaries of this lie. But he's not so stupid that he doesn't realize what they're _doing_, even if he hasn't yet been able to figure out what it means, even if he's still teasing out why, still trying to get his mental fingertips around the shape and form of it.

"Now, this can't be sexual harassment," Sean says, breaking into Tim's thoughts, pulling him back to the office and its jaundiced lighting, back to the stupid half-dead low-light plant at Tim's hip and the file folder digging into Tim's ass, back to the clean sharp scent of soap and cologne. "Can't be sexual harassment unless I'm harassing _you_, right?"

Sean runs a finger under one cuff, between the plastic and Tim's skin, tugging lightly before he drops his hands and steps away, not far, but enough to give Tim some breathing space.

Fucking Sean and his fucking Gordian knot solutions, Tim thinks wryly.

Hit 'em hard, Sean's voice says in the back of his head, and Tim's not sure if it's an echo of Oz or of Memorial Park, 13 years old and the sting of a scraped knee under his old jeans, breath misty and white in the damp chilly air, drying mud itchy on one elbow and the other flag football team facing them across brown autumn grass like handfuls of straw. Sean always did think almost any problem could be solved by barreling straight down the middle, Tim thinks, now, and he huffs a laugh, but there's another part of his head that's looking down at the black plastic against his skin, studying it stark against flesh pale from Irish ancestry and bad nutrition and a life under florescent lights.

Sean's left enough space for Tim to roll his hands, even if he can't slip out of the tight plastic easily, and Tim turns up both palms experimentally, studies the tracery of blue latticework lying under the thin skin on the inside of his wrists, bisected hard and sharp and clean now by the black line. The edges of the plastic aren't as keen as they look - admin won't spend money on decent Kevlar, but they know they can't afford the lawsuits from cheap zip strips and the accidents waiting to happen, there - but Tim still could manage to do himself some damage if he strained or yanked against them, he's pretty sure.

Something hot and heavy coils low in his stomach, in his groin, at the thought, at the idea of a sharp edge and the dull ache of bruises and the tacky feel of blood under the press of Sean's fingers, over his wrists, sliding between their skin. He tests the plastic, pulling slow but steady against its grip, testing the boundaries of this, and he feels it scrape over the point of one wristbone. He remembers the heat of Sean's palms against his skin, sliding down his ribs, thumbs pressing hard above his hipbones, remembers the pull of Sean's fingerprints written in blood on his body, the slide of the shank and the sharp silver slice of pain on 20-second delay, steel already out of his flesh before he even felt it. He remembers Sean kneeling over him, trying to hold him together, cool fingers pressed over the wound in his stomach and shouting distant as they dragged away Omar White - fucking Omar, poor fucking _dead_ Omar. He remembers Sean kneeling over him, the scent of wet leaves and the chill of autumn air, a spray of water against his face and cool fingers cradling his arm, pressed at the edges of the burning pain growing in his elbow as they waited for Jimmy Dudek to make it to the pay phone up the road on his bike.

Tim's teeth ache suddenly, and he wants something between them, something to bite, something with a brief moment of resistance before it gives and he sinks in, sharp and deep and slick.

"Do you trust me?" Sean asks, and the words pull Tim's focus up, back again.

He stares at Sean for a moment, meeting his gaze dumbly, trying to get his head back here, in the office, focused on what's happening between them now, trying to suss out exactly what is happening between them, trying to figure out what the hell is going on in Sean's head. There's something different, some refracted edge to the question, something that's not the normal slant ... well, as normal as Sean's question ever could be in this situation, Tim supposes. He needs to get his head around it, pull it out into the light, pick through it and examine it, and if he could just get a minute to think, he's pretty sure he could figure out what it is.

He's never been that kinky, really. It all seemed vaguely ridiculous, whips and chains and leather, and a lot of work just to get laid. He's mainly been into the vanilla sort of kink, he knows enough to realize it - tying Ellie's hands together with one of her silk scarves or blindfolding her with his tie, getting accidentally elbowed in the nose and tumbling onto the floor in mood-killing shock as her suddenly worried voice spilled over the edge of the bed or breaking down into shared laughter halfway through, ending up lying sprawled on the bed trying to catch his breath until she kicked him in the shin and threatened him with bodily harm if he didn't help her undo these knots right now. There was that assistant state's attorney who wanted to handcuff him to her bed a couple of times, but not with real handcuffs, not the kind that would chunk down heavy on the table in the Murphy kitchen when Sean's dad would pull them off his utility belt at night, not the kind Tim's seen pressed solid in the small of Sean's back when he was in uniform, back when he started working at Attica the first time. No, Anita's handcuffs were just the kind used for play, and they were only playing when they used them, fake fur lining the inside of the cuffs, cast in some kind of light metal alloy that might as well have been plastic - disposable, a sham, a pale shadow of the real thing.

At the thought, Tim's hands jerk against the plastic now twisted tight around his wrists, and he slides out a tongue to wet his lips as he studies Sean in the artificial office light, watching Sean's eyes follow the motion. Sean's question is about more than any of that. It's about Morales, about where they really stand, now, Sean and Tim. Sean's testing Tim, trying to make sure he's really got Tim's trust back, and it's goddam counterproductive now, if he's trying to convince Tim that he's not just giving in to what Tim wants, in order to get back in his good graces.

"Tim?" Sean says, and it's worked before so Tim steals the same tactic from Sean's playbook, again - hit 'em hard - tucking two fingers into the front of Sean's dress shirt and tugging him in, shutting him up with his mouth.

Sean pushes back this time, shoving Tim back onto the desk, and there's a fucking stapler or something under Tim's shoulder, digging in. He squirms, which presses him against Sean, and he can feel Sean hard against his thigh through layers of dress pants and denim, can feel Sean's hips roll and press into him, and it's like some kind of electric bolt straight to Tim's own dick. Sean's shoving Tim's T-shirt up and over his head, and dammit, the goddam cuffs are in the way, Tim can't shake the shirt off from around his wrists, muffling his movements, tangling in his hands above his head, and he scrabbles for some kind of hold on the desk, some kind of balance, Sean already kissing and licking and nipping his way down his chest, tongue and teeth at work on Tim's skin while his hands - solid, capable, practiced fingers - tug open Tim's pants.

Should have done this on the couch, Tim thinks, wildly, before Sean's mouth closes over a nipple, before his teeth sink in and his hand curves around Tim's dick, thumb rubbing harsh over the sticky head, and Tim's spine snaps into an arch, heels hitting the side of the desk with a solid thunk, play turned against him. He grits his teeth, trying to hold in the noises Sean's mouth and hands suddenly are pulling out of him, and he swears, a long low steady stream of imprecations and curses that has Sean's lips curving against his skin.

"That's no way to talk, Timmy," Sean says, leaning up over him, leaning in to whisper low in Tim's ear, and Tim arches again, rubbing his bare chest against the starched front of Sean's shirt as Sean turns his head, fingers firm against Tim's jaw, and kisses him hot and slick and almost brutal before he pulls away and drops to his knees.

Sean's still in that damn tux, Tim realizes, and he should be careful, he's going to get those pants dirty, he thinks vaguely, and there's a flash of memory, a hotel suite, glitter and balloons and Sean's eyes hot on him, holding his gaze as a door closed between them, as Tim's hips rolled, pressing his cock into the palm of Amy's hand. He wants to sit up, wants to watch Sean on his knees, remembers the way his dick looks with Sean's lips stretched around it, but he can't get up, can't get his goddam arms under him, tangled in his T-shirt and sweater, held fast by Sean's stupid zip-strip cuffs.

"_Fuck_," he spits out, and Sean laughs again, a warm puff of air over the head of Tim's cock, pulling an involuntary writhe out of Tim's hips, and then Tim's sliding into moist heat, feeling Sean's tongue flatten against the underside of his cock, all the way down in one long gliding motion, and Tim thinks his spine might come out through his dick.

Sean _swallows_, and Tim sees stars, he bangs his head against the desk so hard. He realizes Sean's got his jeans dragged halfway down, now, around his thighs, has spread him out on the desk like this is part of the job right along with the paperwork, goddammit, but Tim's having a hard time caring, at this point, particularly when Sean pulls off his dick with a wet slide and an obscene slick sound and Tim already recognizes the noises Sean's making, knows he's sucking on his own fingers, getting them wet.

"Motherfucking _bastard_," Tim says, flailing as much as he can with his hands tangled in plastic and fabric, and he'll deny to his dying day that there's a sob underneath the words, but Jesus Christ, the air of his office is lying damp and chilly against bared skin and he just needs Sean to _touch him again_.

He almost falls sideways over the edge of the desk when Sean wraps a hand around the base of his cock, and Sean stands back up to lean over him, putting one hand on Tim's heaving chest, over his racing heart for a moment before he moves to press on the tangled mess of fabric binding Tim's hands above his head. The weight stretches Tim out, holds him down and taut and still.

"I need you to be still, Tim," Sean says - murmurs, almost - leaning in, lips moving against Tim's beard, his cheek, and he presses a quick kiss to Tim's mouth, teeth coming out to drag across Tim's lower lip before he slicks his tongue over the sting. "Can you be still for me?"

"I don't know, Sean," Tim says, slanting a look over at him, eyes narrowed. "Are you going to fuck me yet?"

"Still got a smart mouth, don't you?" Sean says, but the words sound contemplative, almost affectionate, and he presses his thumb against Tim's lower lip now, uses it to pull open Tim's mouth and glides the pad along the edge of Tim's teeth before he leans in for another sucking kiss, thumb sliding damp with Tim's own spit down to the corner of his jaw as Tim tilts his head into Sean's hand.

Sean manages to get Tim's pants all the way off one leg, still trailing from his left ankle, before he loses patience and kneels at the edge of the desk again, and when he presses a thumb to Tim's hole ... OK, fine. Tim's kind of a slut, all right? He's never seen anything _wrong_ with liking sex, he's a sex-positive kind of guy, and so he's got no problem spreading his legs easy as you please to let Sean do whatever he wants down there with his talented tongue and his skillful fingers. It's not like it's the first time Tim's had somebody's fingers up there, one girl in grad school couldn't keep her fingers out of his ass while she was blowing him, and he remembers Sean's tongue from two nights ago, opening Tim up, and his hands pulling Tim's hips back, up and off the bed, keeping him from rubbing his dick against the sheets, and he remembers how wide Sean felt when he finally slid in, like a fist, like he'd reached inside Tim the only way he could. He barely had to get his hand around Tim's dick before Tim was coming like he was 16 again, and what other man would Tim trust like that? Of course it was Sean, it's always been Sean, who else could it have been?

He pulls one foot up on the desk, hooks his other knee over a broad shoulder as Sean leans in, strong slick tongue tracing the ring of muscle before pressing into him, and he rolls his hips into the burn as Sean slides in a finger. He grits out Sean's name between his teeth, and he's so far gone, he doesn't even care that he's getting ready to beg.

Sean pulls his mouth away before he adds a second finger, damp and dragging against delicate flesh, and licks up toward Tim's balls. He's got his free hand curved around Tim's thigh, thumb rubbing soothingly over fuzz and skin as he hums almost absently to himself, a low vibration that shakes something loose inside Tim's chest, and Tim flexes aching fingers inside their cocoon of cotton and wool above his head, desperate.

"For God's _sake_, Sean ..."

His voice breaks, thready and strained, and maybe that's why Sean relents. There's a third finger suddenly, stretching Tim impossibly wide, and Sean's mouth, Sean's _throat_ opening and sliding down his cock. Tim convulses, muscles and tendons strained to breaking, hearing a folder hit the floor, a sheaf of papers fanning out across the office as he comes, turning his face into the tangle of cloth bundled around his hands to muffle the cry trapped behind his teeth.

That's when the sudden knock on the door yanks his heart out of his chest, lifts him straight up off the desk in shock - almost through the ceiling, it feels like - and sends him scrabbling among copies of invoices and timesheets and discipline reports for balance, for equilibrium, sucking in a gasp of air. Sean makes a tight muffled choking sound and Tim can feel him startle, down on the floor, fingers tightening around Tim's thigh, shoulder bumping his knee.

"Shit," Sean finally manages to say, low and raspy, and Tim has a flash of morning sunlight filtered through dusty blinds onto damp skin, a sagging towel, teeth marks in Sean's chest.

"Let me up," he whispers frantically to Sean under another barrage of sharp knocks, like he could move now, even if he wanted to, like it's Sean holding him down and not the weight of post-orgasmic inertia. "Let me _up_."

"McManus? Are you still in there?" says a female voice through the door, through the blank closed blinds.

He flails again, somehow manages to haul himself upright, almost toppling over, saved only by the fingers Sean tightens around his hip, feeling ridiculous as he perches bare-assed on his desk, spent dick still slick with spit and traces of come, cuffed and tangled hands held to his bare chest. A prim spasm of outraged dignity demands he press his knees together, but Sean's still down there, in the way.

"Aguilar? What the fuck do you want?" He knows he sounds impatient, but he thinks he's got a good reason, here.

"I wanted to know if you've got the paperwork approving my vacation for next month."

Sean's got his forehead pressed to the inside of Tim's thigh, and when Tim looks down, he sees Sean's shoulders shaking. It takes Tim a moment to realize he's laughing.

"You need to come back later," he calls, and he cuffs Sean in the head with his tangled hands, shimmying away on the desk top as Sean presses a retaliatory bite into the hollow of his hip. "This is _not funny_," he adds, hissing under his breath and kicking Sean in the side, earning a pinch low on his hip, almost his ass, in response.

"McManus, my grandmother is gonna be pissed if I'm not there for my Papa's 75th birthday," the voice through the door says impatiently, and Tim can see her shadow shift against the blinds.

"Aguilar, _Jesus Christ_. I'm getting ready for the dinner. I don't have any pants on, in here."

"McManus, that is more than I needed to know." She sounds vaguely horrified and so young it makes Tim feel tired.

"Then get out of here, and leave me _alone_. Jesus." Tim falls back on the desk, hands draped above his head. "This is not as sexy in the aftermath," he informs the ceiling.

"I don't know what you were talking about, lying to Aguilar like that." Sean's voice is still low and hoarse, and a shiver runs over Tim's skin at the thought of how it got that way. "You've got your pants on. Halfway. You've just got your dick hangin' out."

Tim's got his mouth already open to snap out a sharp retort when he rolls his head and looks down at Sean, who's looking up at him, and Sean licks slick, swollen lips, bringing up a hand to swipe across the bottom one with the back of his wrist.

Sean raises an eyebrow at him expectantly, then grins, lips stretching wider as Tim remains speechless. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tim notes that Sean rolled up his sleeves, at some point, but most of his higher thought processes are sidelined by the sight of Sean's _mouth_, Jesus Christ. Tim's not sure he's ever going to be able to look at it without getting hard, from now on. He struggles to sit up again, wincing against the twinge in his back as he twists, because he's getting sadly too old for this kind of thing, and once he's upright, he rests his hands - both of them, still cuffed together - on Sean's chest, raising two fingers to run along Sean's bottom lip. Sean licks out at them, warm, wet, and Tim slides them all the way in, watching them glide in and out between Sean's lips the same way he's watched his dick stretch Sean's mouth. A remnant of lust curls through him, too faint to really act on.

"Get up," he finally says, reaching down and hauling Sean to his feet, already starting to feel weird about having Sean down there, head pressed against Tim's knee.

Sean leans on the desk to pull himself up, and he winces, too, and Tim knows it's his bad knee, the one that took him off the football field their sophomore year in high school, that he babied all through his Golden Gloves career, that took him down when he waded into the middle of an altercation - a fist-fight - between Robson and Bauer and Johnston and Darrell Brown in Unit B a couple of years ago. He presses his fingertips to Sean's lips again once they're both standing, feels the faint flicker of Sean's tongue before he pulls away.

They can't find scissors, of course, and Tim struggles back into his T-shirt and sweater, trying to untangle them from the plastic cuffs, getting wool and cotton untwisted and settled around his neck as Sean digs through the desk drawers, muttering under his breath about Tim's idiosyncratic filing tendencies. Tim spends a couple of minutes hopping around on one foot before he sits - OK, _falls_ \- onto the couch to get his jeans turned right-side out, shimmying them back up around his hips from where they've been trailing, still attached to his ankle.

"Those are the wrong pants," Sean says, looking up, and he points to the tux still hanging against the wall.

"Was this supposed to be some kind of bribe, Officer Murphy?" Tim makes a face like they're 13 again.

"No," Sean says, getting up from Tim's chair, brandishing the snub-tipped regulation scissors he's finally managed to unearth in the back of the middle drawer, scissors that always remind Tim of kindergarten and the smell of glue and the rough silk feel of construction paper against his fingertips. "The bribe is the way I'm going to let you fuck me, after."

He grabs the plastic between Tim's wrists, hand fisted and pressed to Tim's for a moment before he starts sawing away, face down and intent on his work as the scissors slide cold against Tim's skin. He lays a kiss against each wrist as he cuts them free, pulling Tim's hands to his face, and Tim swears he feels a wet swipe of tongue tracing the blue latticework of veins under the thin skin of his right wrist, and his stomach hollows out, breath catching like he's been punched in the gut.

"What about you _now_?" he asks as he shakes out his freed hands, rubbing a thumb across the tender spot where his yanking pulled the plastic rough over one point of bone. He thinks he'll be keeping his sleeves rolled down for a couple of days, and there's a flush of heat in his chest, his groin, as he remembers the rough red patch on Sean's chest - beard burn - disappearing under the black uniform shirt as Sean buttoned it up two mornings ago.

"Ah, there's no time for that," Sean says, stepping back and tossing the scissors into the mess on Tim's desk.

"What? No, that's not fair," Tim says, and Sean rolls his eyes in familiar response.

It seems like Tim's been saying that his whole life, about everything from his curfew to weekend homework assignments to migrant workers' rights to the state's prison policies, and Sean's been rolling his eyes and backing him up. Life's not fair - that's been Sean's mantra from the time Tim met him, 11 years old and standing on the sidewalk with the school bus disappearing around the corner, curiously adult, parroting his mama Tim would discover, and Sean's continued to say it, all the time, every time, right before he turns around and tries to set things to Tim's idea of rights nevertheless, letting Tim's passion drag him along.

Ellie had loved that about Tim too, in the beginning - his passion for justice, his desire to make the world a better place - but she'd eventually gotten tired of it.

"Nobody's keeping score, Tim," Sean says now, like when Tim tried to get him in bed that first night, when Sean broke off their kisses.

What the hell are you doing? Sean had asked and then he'd told Tim that he didn't have to, said he'd be there for Tim anyway, no matter what, in every way that mattered, solid and dependable, like bedrock. _This matters, too,_ Tim had thought, but what he'd said was, I know you want this. Sean had laughed at him, a laugh with an edge to it. Everything isn't about you, Tim, he'd said, and things could have gone pear-shaped right there, or maybe that was the out Sean had offered, maybe it was the way Tim could have gotten out of this before it went too far for him to handle, but he was right, goddammit, he knew he was right, and he wasn't going to let Sean deny it, no matter how much Sean made him fight for it, and so he touched Sean, kept touching him, held on.

"Fuck that," he says now, standing with his jeans still undone in the middle of his office. "It's about giving each other what we need, and you need this."

Sean does need this, goddammit, and Tim can see that, he can see what people need, even when the dumbass motherfuckers don't know any better, themselves. If he can see it with the yutzes locked up in his unit, he can certainly see it with Sean.

"I'm not the one who needed to relax," Sean tells him, fumbling with the cufflink on one sleeve.

"Give me that," Tim says, stepping toward him and reaching out to pry the bit of jewelry out of Sean's grasp. He bats away Sean's hand before turning his attention to the buttonhole, twisting Sean's arm for a better view. "This isn't supposed to be some kind of _job_, you know. I don't care how many other people in this prison I've gone out with, it's not in the job description. And it's not what I was expecting when I recruited you to come to Em City."

He pushes viciously at the cufflink, stabbing it through the buttonhole, more frustrated than before, pissed off again. Sean keeps doing this, looking for reassurance, making Tim prove over and over that Tim still trusts him, but he won't seem to believe Tim isn't doing him some kind of favor, doesn't seem to believe that Tim really wants him, wants whatever this is between them, whatever lies between the boundaries Tim hasn't quite sussed out, yet.

So why the hell does he keep making Tim fuck him, if he thinks Tim doesn't really want to?

"Is it the straight thing?" Tim says and looks up into Sean's puzzled face. "Because it was still the '70s when I was in college, you know. Well, part of the time, it was the '70s. And it's not like the first three years of the '80s weren't really still the '70s. The point is, it's not like I never got a handjob from another guy before. And it's not like I've never had a woman's fingers up my ass when she was ... What?"

"What hell goes on in your head, Timmy?" Sean asks and raises a hand to press his thumb to the corner of Tim's mouth before combing his fingertips through his beard, a light brief touch that leaves Tim licking his lips again. "Anyway, there's no _time_."

Tim's not sure about that. He's no blowjob expert - yet - but he hasn't had a problem getting Sean off so far, and he's got something to prove. So he kisses Sean, shutting him up with his mouth, pushing back, pushing him against the wall of the office, cool prison stone at his back, licking inside his mouth, and when Sean reaches up a hand, fingers against his jaw, Tim tilts his face into the touch even as Sean opens to Tim's mouth.


End file.
